“We’re interested in trying to develop ways of understanding how cancer cells behave on extracellular matrix materials that are much more like what they would encounter in the body, instead of a petri dish,” says Laura Suggs, associate professor of biomedical engineering. Her work could help inform clinical trials or drug screenings for cancer treatments.

Faculty at The University of Texas at Austin are tackling the challenge from many fronts, spending years in the lab, exploring new treatments with patients and working for funding to give people access to more effective diagnostic tools, less toxic medicine, less expensive care and more emotional support.

From examining nanoparticles and cell biology to rethinking massive health care administration systems, these researchers are working to more deeply understand cancer in order to defeat it.

“There is actually much more to learn. It’s the tip of the iceberg,” Suggs says of the current body of knowledge. “And even if we understood everything that happens during cancer progression, when you put a chemotherapeutic drug in there, it changes everything. There is still so much work to be done.”

Suggs sees the most productive work coming from groups of inter-disciplinary researchers working together, rather than the now-common single-investigator-driven approach. (“That’s not how science works best,” she says.)

It’s why she formed a cancer-focused working group with fellow UT researchers Amy Brock (biomedical engineering), Carla Van Den Berg (pharmacy) and Vernita Gordon (physics). They are meeting to learn more about each other’s work and review other research and hope to start collaborating on projects soon. Over the course of her career, Suggs has seen research funding decline, and thinks larger group projects might be able to advance the science further than solo researchers working on smaller projects independently.

Below, learn about some of the work being done at UT to outsmart cancer.

1.James Tunnell, associate professor of biomedical engineering, created a pen-sized instrument that can detect skin cancer within seconds using light pulses. The quick, non-invasive tool could help save billions of dollars — and ease patients’ pain — by eliminating the need for biopsies of benign lesions.

6. Edward Marcotte, professor of molecular biosciences is developing a large-scale rapid method for diagnosing and characterizing cancers noninvasively using fluids such as saliva, blood and urine, identifying and quantifying individual peptides or proteins that point to the presence of cancer in the body.

Support More of UT’s Good Work

8. John DiGiovanni, professor of pharmacy and nutritional sciences, has identified a gene that plays a role in susceptibility to nonmelanoma skin cancer — a discovery that could lead to novel strategies for prevention of that form of cancer.

9. Biomedical engineering professor Stanislav Emelianov is engineering nanoparticles that can extract information from cancer cells and relay the information to physicians in real time, allowing for more effective treatment.

10. Debbie Volker, associate professor of nursing, researches ethical issues and end-of-life care for adults with a cancer diagnosis, their families and nurses.

Mary Lou Adams meets with a patient at the Community Women’s Wellness Center. [Photo: Christina Murrey]

Students at Work

1. Chemical engineering senior Sai Gourisankar has worked with professor Keith Johnston to design gold nanoclusters for biomedical imaging and therapy to treat cancer and other diseases. His research could help identify malignant cell clusters within a healthy body and allow for pinpoint treatment that would limit damage to the surrounding cells.

2. Biomedical engineering senior Nishu Mehta worked in professor George Georgiou’s lab for three years, creating a hybrid antibody that binds with combined immune cells, thus having the potential to be a much more potent cancer therapeutic. Nishu, Georgiou and graduate student William Kelton have filed a U.S. patent for the invention of the dual antibody.

3. Texas 4000 is a UT student organization that runs the longest annual charity bike ride in the world, pedaling more than 4,000 miles from Austin to Anchorage, Alaska, to raise funds for cancer research and raise awareness about cancer prevention and treatment. Texas 4000 has raised more than $3.5 million since launching in 2003.

This is the first story in the yearlong series “In Pursuit of Health,” covering medical news and research happening across the university.

Breast cancer cells under a microscope. [Credit: Ed Uthman]

Cancer cells, by their very definition, are abnormal. They proliferate faster, consume more resources and go places they’re not supposed to.

A less studied way to keep cells from going down the path of abnormality is to manipulate how they communicate with each other via channels called gap junctions. It’s an area that’s getting attention from the laboratory of Jeanne Stachowiak, assistant professor in the Cockrell School of Engineering.

Gap junctions are protein channels that extend across a cell’s membrane border and connect with gap junctions of other cells. When a cell starts to act up, its neighbors send messages through the gap junctions to rein it in.

Cancer cells, determined to take over the cellular neighborhood, aren’t interested in hearing those messages and thus stop producing gap junctions.

Stachowiak and graduate student Avinash Gadok are using donor cells to make materials that can be injected to restore gap junctions to cancer cells.

“We’re making membranes that are heavily enriched with these junction proteins and delivering them to tumor cells to see if we can reconnect the cells and reestablish their communication pathways with neighboring healthy cells,” Stachowiak said.

Instead of going to war with cancer cells by killing them and quite possibly damaging healthy tissues along the way, the gap junction method is more of a diplomatic solution.

“A better approach than killing tumor cells, if it were possible, would be to just convince them to behave normally,” Stachowiak said. “This idea of normalizing cells has been attractive for a long time but there just haven’t been super effective ways of doing it.”

So far, it seems possible. They’ve had success in experiments with tissue cultures. Now, they want to try normalizing cells with 3-D tissue cultures and in animals. They’re exploring collaborations with Carla Van Den Berg and Hugh Smyth, professors in the College of Pharmacy, to further the research.

Stachowiak started the project with a $25,000 seed grant from Texas 4000, a student group that raises money to fight cancer with an annual bike ride of more than 4,000 miles to Alaska.

Besides delivering messages to the misbehaving cells, the injected gap junction proteins could carry drugs and chemotherapeutics, Stachowiak said. The delivery would be targeted to specific cells, bypassing their membrane barriers, potentially delivering drugs more efficiently than current drug and chemotherapy treatments can.

Vishy Iyer, professor of molecular genetics and microbiology, and Matt Cowperthwaite, research director of the NeuroTexas
Institute at St. David’s. Photo: Alex Wang

When patients are diagnosed with glioblastoma, one of the worst forms of brain cancer, their options are limited.

Even after surgically accessing the brain to remove as much of the tumor as possible and applying intense chemotherapy, the prognosis is poor. The average survival time is about 14 months.

“There are really no good treatments,” said Vishy Iyer, a professor of molecular genetics and microbiology in the College of Natural Sciences at The University of Texas at Austin, who is trying to change that.

“You can do surgery and chemotherapy, but glioblastoma is just bad to have.”

Symptoms can start as headaches and nausea. If ignored, the tumor continues to grow, putting pressure on other parts of the brain. Seizures appear. As the tumor’s size increases further, the pressure in the skull becomes life threatening as even far reaches of the brain are bruised against the skull. This begins the progressive deterioration of personality and memory.

Before surgery — even before symptoms appear — a cancerous tumor starts as what can only be considered a freak accident: a mutation, a random change in a cell’s DNA that leads to uncontrolled cell division. Different mutations cause different cancers and even different molecular subtypes of cancers.

Iyer and Cowperthwaite are taking advantage of two resources: the Austin Brain Tumor Repository started by Cowperthwaite and a technology known as next-generation, or “next-gen,” sequencing.

A Magnetic Resonance Image

A magnetic resonance (MR) image reveals a lesion (the circular object with a dark center in the upper left portion) from a patient with glioblastoma multiforme, the most common and most deadly form of primary brain tumor in adults.

Image courtesy of NeuroTexas Institute.

“Compare making an old-fashioned, smudged fingerprint with ink to making fingerprints with a high-resolution, digital scanner,” Iyer said. “The results we can now obtain, thanks to next-gen sequencing, can be very powerful and very exciting.”

DNA sequencing is the process by which scientists determine the order of the nucleotide bases — thymine, adenine, guanine, cytosine — in a piece of DNA. Next-generation sequencing, a concept first developed in 2004, provides a way to perform this task more quickly and less expensively.

Conventional sequencing processes can process DNA at approximately 100,000 bases per day with a cost of about 5 cents per base. Iyer’s group uses the next-generation sequencing techniques to sequence roughly 1 billion bases per day at about 0.00002 cents per base.

What this sequencing will allow them to do, said Cowperthwaite, is get a better insight into the individuality of tumors.

“You and I could both have the same type of tumor, in the sense that the clinical diagnosis may be glioblastoma, but yours may be different from mine,” he added. “And I feel as if this research will lead to a better understanding of what is driving those differences.”

The researchers believe that a source of these differences may be mutations in or around molecules known as transcription factors.

“Transcription factors are switches,” Cowperthwaite said. “Essentially they are like light switches; they turn genes on and off. They typically only control particular light switches. But, as the tumors accumulate mutations and change, they may learn how to turn on new lights, or they may lose the ability to turn on or off some lights they normally control.”

To identify these mutations Iyer is using a technique that can essentially identify and isolate what part of the DNA the transcription factors associate with. That DNA is then sequenced specifically in search of mutations.

“Our project is taking a unique approach by focusing on the cancer’s regulatory pathways and the DNA mutations that take place inside the tumor’s regulatory pathways instead of sequencing the entire genome of the cancer like many researchers are currently doing,” Iyer said.

The project uses a sort of double comparison. Iyer and Cowperthwaite have access to both tumor sample DNA and blood sample DNA for each patient. First, they compare these two samples to see what mutations are unique to each tumor.

Then, because Cowperthwaite has given Iyer access to many glioblastoma samples, they plan to compare the mutations against those in all of the other tumors using sophisticated computing software.

Cowperthwaite started the Austin Brain Tumor Repository in 2011. He and his team work closely with neurosurgeons and neuroncologists to learn of tumor operations taking place at the hospital.

A Genetic Sequence

A genetic sequence of part of a glioblastoma tumor cell’s DNA. The researchers’ goal is to understand how the genetic control sequences vary between glioblastoma tumors.

Image courtesy of Vishy Iyer.

“Normally, most of the tumor tissues that are removed during surgery are discarded as biowaste,” he said, adding that besides the initial purchase of a powerful freezer, the tumor bank has been relatively inexpensive to maintain. “When we learn of an operation, we go in and ask the patient if they would want to donate their tumor tissue to research. The vast majority says it’s an easy decision.”

Determining the patterns of different mutations in different tumors will allow the team to identify molecular subtypes of the cancer. The hope of the researchers is that this information can one day be used to develop personalized therapies for cancer.

“Instead of a treatment like chemotherapy that hits all dividing cells, we may be able to use drugs that target specific types of subtypes of tumors,” Iyer said. “Identifying different subtypes based on different interrupted regulatory pathways will allow for the use of specific drugs that interact with specific pathways.”

Although Iyer and Cowperthwaite are still trying to identify the molecular subtypes of glioblastoma and years of more research would be needed to produce these specific drugs, there are several possibilities for treatment if the dream is realized.

If the cancer is caught in an early stage, its growth could be halted by disrupting the specific pathways that keep it dividing and functioning. At later stages there is the possibility of removing a large part of the tumor and then stopping the growth of what remains. This could result in permanent remission.

“Cancer is moving out of this phase of just finding the changes that caused the tumor, which we were doing just five years ago,” Cowperthwaite said. “Inventories of mutations are interesting catalogs, but translating that into something that is actionable is becoming more prominent. That movement is what Vishy and I want to be a part of. Perhaps someday we will be able to run detailed genetic tests on a patient’s tumor and say, ‘Here’s a treatment plan that will cure your disease.’”

]]>http://www.utexas.edu/know/2012/03/05/tanya_paull_cprit_cancer_research/feed/0Improving surgical outcomeshttp://www.utexas.edu/know/2011/08/18/child_surgical_improve/
http://www.utexas.edu/know/2011/08/18/child_surgical_improve/#commentsThu, 18 Aug 2011 21:43:41 +0000Samantha Youngbloodhttp://www.utexas.edu/know/?p=20884Faculty and students at the Cockrell School of Engineering are developing ways for cancer patients and children born with facial deformities to make more informed decisions about which reconstructive surgeries would be most aesthetically pleasing and practical based on their individual body types and personal preferences.

The interdisciplinary research, which includes Biomedical Engineering Professor Mia K. Markey and Aerospace Engineering Professor K. Ravi-Chandar, pairs faculty and students with doctors and patients at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center and Dell Children’s Medical Center of Central Texas.

Researchers at both medical centers are using novel 3-D surface imaging technology and algorithms to address one of the most difficult questions for cancer patients and children facing reconstructive surgery: What procedure is right for me?

“With breast cancer patients, they are usually candidates for more than one kind of reconstructive surgery and the only reason to choose one over another is the patient’s own preference,” Markey said. “So that patient may be able to understand differences in costs or how long one procedure will require her to be in the hospital, but in terms of understanding how it will change her appearance, she wouldn’t know a reason to pick one procedure over the other.”

Options based off of patients’ preferences

But Markey, along with a team of surgeons, doctors and psychologists at MD Anderson, aims to change that. The researchers are in the midst of several research projects — funded by the American Cancer Society and the National Institutes of Health — to develop technology for quantifying surgical outcomes and understanding patients’ perceptions of changes in their appearance.

Traditionally, the area of a patient’s body that will be reconstructed is measured by doctors with measuring tape. But it’s hard to know upfront which measurements are important — meaning multiple measurements may be required — and the method can be uncomfortable for patients.

Markey and her team are simplifying the process, however, by using commercially available 3-D surface imaging technology. The technology takes multiple photos of patients prior to their surgery and builds 3-D models and measurements of the photographed area in a matter of minutes.

Such models then can be used to build simulations of what a patient would look like if he or she had a procedure. For cancer patients undergoing facial reconstructive surgery, the models would help better define cosmetic outcomes. And for breast cancer patients, who often must choose from multiple procedures, the simulations would make it easier to decide which procedure provides the most desired physical effect.

“We’re trying to do this in an honest way, so that these aren’t just fancy computer graphics. They provide patients with a realistic picture of what they would look like after their surgery and are constrained by what is actually surgically possible,” Markey said.

The bigger goal of one of the research projects is to identify underlying commonalities among breast cancer patients — like age, feelings on body image issues, disease history, etc. — so that surgeons and doctors can provide women with reconstructive surgery options that are more tailored to their individual needs, expectations post-surgery and physical and mental characteristics.

Markey, along with Fatima Merchant, an engineering alumna and University of Houston assistant professor, and Michelle Fingeret, a clinical psychologist and an assistant professor at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, are in the process of collecting up to 500 surveys from breast cancer patients undergoing reconstructive surgery at MD Anderson. Responses from the surveys will eventually help researchers create complex algorithms that — similarly to how Netflix and Amazon can predict what movies or products a person will like based on his or her shopping history and interests — a doctor could recommend surgical procedures based on a patient’s health history and desired physical appearance post-surgery.

While the surveys and research won’t benefit women currently being treated for breast cancer, Fingeret said many of them want to participate because they know the “body image profiles” derived from their responses will help another patient down the road.

“We have extremely high participation rates [in the surveys,]” said Fingeret, an assistant professor in the Department of Behavioral Science with joint appointments in the Departments of Plastic Surgery and Head and Neck Surgery at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center. “When we tell people the goal of this research, they’re very interested in helping others because they’ll tell you it’s probably the most difficult decision they’ve had to make.”

The group is also leading a separate study on how cancer patients requiring facial reconstructive surgery adjust to body image issues and changes over time. In such instances, patients typically don’t have a choice over the type of reconstructive procedures because the goal of surgery is to remove cancerous tumors while maintaining or restoring as much function as possible.

The research aims to develop a way for better defining cosmetic outcomes.

Creating the face of Central Texas children

In Adriana Da Silveira‘s day to day job, the need to better define cosmetic outcomes for patients is great.

Children born with facial deformities such as cleft palate or hemifacial microsomia — a condition characterized by asymmetrical face and skull — pass through her office at Dell Children’s Medical Center, where she is chief of orthodontics at the Craniofacial & Reconstructive Plastic Surgery Center. Because the deformities of her patients have existed since birth, Da Silveira, Dr. Patrick Kelley and other plastic surgeons struggle to explain to parents what their child will look like following a surgical procedure. After all, there is no frame of reference for what the child would have looked like had the deformity never occurred.

“Basically, it’s like we’re having to guess,” Da Silveira said. “Parents want to know what their child is going to look like in the end but when they can’t see it and there’s no visual way to show it, they just have to trust us. And for a kid it’s hard to say what the normal or acceptable appearance of a face is.”

Markey and UT engineering students are applying the same 3-D imaging technology used at MD Anderson to eventually help Da Silveira and other surgeons.

Markey pictured with Juhun Lee, a graduate student in electrical and computer engineering and a graduate research assistant in biomedical engineering.

Researchers are in the process of collecting 3-D images and measurements of Hispanic children ages 7-12 who do not have facial deformities. The group represents the largest child population treated at the center and images of them could help researchers determine what facial characteristics are considered normal or aesthetically-pleasing on the face of a Hispanic child in that age group.

After a total of 80 images are collected, the attractiveness of the photos will be rated. Researchers plan to develop statistical correlations from these ratings and provide doctors with guides or computer simulations of which facial characteristics are considered most attractive — be it when a nose is shaped smaller or the width of a smile is larger.

In a sense, such advances will help put a face to Central Texas children. Along the way, they are providing Markey’s students with hands-on research opportunities that they otherwise would not receive.

“If you go into a hospital and volunteer, you’re not going to get this same level of interaction as I get here,” said Brian Ku, who will be a senior in biomedical engineering this fall and is helping lead the task of collecting images.

Ku is among a group of students — from undergraduate through postdoctoral and representing a range of engineering disciplines — who contribute to the research. The students have had the chance to watch surgeries and interact with patients undergoing reconstructive surgery — experiences that Markey says are crucial to their education.

“As I was developing my research career and thinking of the direction I could go, it was important for me to do something where people didn’t say, ‘Why?’ I wanted people to recognize its importance,” Markey said. “And with this, we can see where the research is going to help someone. So while it’s exciting to discover something new in our work, it’s equally exciting to know we can impact a person’s life for the better.”

“Life-saving solutions for surgeries” — Professor Thomas Hughes pioneers patient-specific 3-D models of blood flow through the heart and blood vessels that could help guide best practices for cardiologists.

“Conquering breast cancer” — Dr. John Zhang, an engineering professor, has developed a new technology that acts like a GPS device for cancer surgeons.

]]>http://www.utexas.edu/know/2011/08/18/child_surgical_improve/feed/0Conquering breast cancerhttp://www.utexas.edu/know/2011/06/28/zhang_cancer_research/
http://www.utexas.edu/know/2011/06/28/zhang_cancer_research/#commentsTue, 28 Jun 2011 18:37:06 +0000Samantha Youngbloodhttp://www.utexas.edu/know/?p=20346This story originally appeared on the Cockrell School of Engineering Web site.

Breast cancer affects nearly one out of eight American women during their lifetime. Of those women, around 40 percent undergo more than one surgery to remove malignant breast tissue.

Dr. John Zhang wants to change these odds — and his solution includes biopsy-free examinations and real-time pathology imaging during surgery.

“Cancer is the top disease that is killing people,” said Zhang, a professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at the Cockrell School. “And right now, we know biopsy is the standard. Doctors are removing tumors in the breast without having anything to tell them if the whole tumor has been removed … patients wait through a 24-hour time cycle to learn whether the cancer tumor is still there.”

Zhang’s new technology eliminates the wait.

He has developed a new technology that acts like a GPS device for cancer surgeons. The instrument guides doctors during surgery, enabling them to see in real time whether all of the cancerous tissue has been removed.

According to Zhang, the key innovation behind the technology is a micro-electro-mechanical system (MEMS) laser scanner. This handheld device — which uses a microchip that was created in his lab — generates real-time 3-D images of surface cell tissue, or more technically, ‘confocal images of epithelial tissue.’

While confocal imaging has been around for a few decades, miniaturized confocal imaging devices — such as the handheld one Zhang has developed with his laser microchip technology — are something new.

The main method to generate confocal images is to use a large-scale microscope that costs more than $1 million and requires a biopsy from the patient.

In contrast, Zhang’s technology “brings the microscope to the patient, not the tissue to the microscope.”

“Fundamentally, this chip would enable a new platform that integrates very small and cost effective components replacing the large device,” he said.

Zhang started researching real-time imaging devices for early cancer detection in 2006, and has continued to receive funding from the National Science Foundation, National Institute of Health (NIH), National Instruments and others.

“I think that it’s really important for the technologies developed at top engineering schools to make an impact on society,” he said. “We are using federal support and tax dollars, so we should work very hard to improve the quality of life. I really want to bring research to society.”

Recently, Zhang received nearly $1 million from NIH’s National Cancer Institute to fund his research initiatives over the next three years. Collaborators include Dr. Kostia Sokolov, adjunct associate professor of biomedical engineering, and Drs. Eugene Frenkel and Jonathan Uhr, professors of internal medicine and radiology at UT Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas.

The team also includes biomedical engineering graduate student Youmin Wang and undergraduate student Milan Raj.

“We have very talented students and they want to solve societal problems and conquer cancer,” Zhang said. “We do this discovery every day in the lab and that is part of the learning and the education — the knowledge moving forward.”

This forward momentum inspired Zhang to license his microchip technology with the university’s Office of Technology Commercialization, and create a spin-off company called NanoLite Systems Inc. The company was co-founded with Ting Shen who received her Ph.D. from Stanford University and later worked for McKinsey & Co. and Cisco Systems, but left to become CEO of NanoLite.

“If we can take this [technology] to market and reduce that redo rate for cancer surgery by just a few percent, we are moving the needle in a lot of people’s lives,” Shen said.

Shen was immediately inspired by Zhang’s research and the impact it could have on breast cancer detection, noting she has had close friends and family diagnosed with cancer.

“I’ve heard real life stories from patients — they anxiously await the call from the doctor to see if they are cancer free now. It’s emotionally and physically painful,” she said. “If we have the technology to develop cancer imaging devices that enable doctors to see better — to see cancer in real time during surgery — then they can remove the cancer much better.”

NanoLite Systems is currently working with the Austin Technology Incubator to help commercialize the technology and propel the company’s success. Shen recently presented the business plan at the Texas Venture Labs Expo during Venture Week.

“This technology started here at UT Austin and we will contribute to the vision to conquer cancer, in Texas [and] in Austin,” Zhang said. “If we aren’t doing it here, somewhere else will.”

]]>http://www.utexas.edu/know/2011/06/28/zhang_cancer_research/feed/16Tagged for destructionhttp://www.utexas.edu/know/2010/01/11/tagged-for-destruction/
http://www.utexas.edu/know/2010/01/11/tagged-for-destruction/#commentsMon, 11 Jan 2010 22:32:16 +0000Marjorie Smithhttp://www.utexas.edu/know/?p=5858In the early 1990s, as a postdoctoral fellow at the National Cancer Institute and Harvard Medical School, Jon Huibregtse was part of the team that determined how human papillomaviruses (HPVs) promote the development of cervical cancer.

It was an important biomedical breakthrough, one that helped lead to the development of a vaccine for HPV, which infects about 20 million people in America (with more than 5 million new infections contracted every year). It was also a leap forward in the basic scientific understanding of how the virus affects human cells.

“We figured out that one of the HPV proteins hijacks a key regulatory system in cervical epithelial cells,” Huibregtse said. “This results in the degradation of an important tumor suppressor, which is a key event in the development of these cancers.”

For Huibregtse, now a professor of molecular genetics and microbiology, that discovery was the beginning of a more than decade-long investigation of a class of proteins, known as ubiquitin ligases, that play a central role in regulating the life of a cell.

“The ubiquitin system is found in every cell in every eukaryotic organism,” Huibregtse said. “It is, as the name suggests, ubiquitous. It functions as a specific tag to eliminate proteins from the cell.”

When ubiquitin ligases are working properly, Huibregtse said, they signal that certain other proteins, which have completed their tasks, should be destroyed. The result is that no-longer-useful proteins are directed into the proteosome, the cell’s “garbage disposal.” The proteosome breaks the old proteins apart and releases the pieces to be recycled into new proteins.

When ubiquitin ligases are reprogrammed or inhibited, however, the results can be disastrous. For example, a brain-specific loss in the production of the ligase that was discovered in the course of Huibregtse’s HPV research leads to the severe neurologic disease called Angelman Syndrome.

In the case of HPVs, the virus reprograms this ligase to tag a protein called p53, Huibregtse said, which is “so important to protecting cells from mutations that it’s been dubbed the guardian of the genome.” With the p53 tumor suppressor protein destroyed, the likelihood of cancer development increases dramatically.

“But remember,” Huibregtse said, “the HPVs have no interest in causing cancer; they are just trying to get by — to propagate themselves. In fact, the specific molecular events that lead to cervical cancer ensure that the virus will no longer replicate. From the perspective of both the virus and the host, the consequence of the initial viral infection can, quite literally, be a dead-end.”

]]>http://www.utexas.edu/know/2010/01/11/tagged-for-destruction/feed/0Cancer research funded for $11.6 millionhttp://www.utexas.edu/know/2009/11/09/cancer_research/
http://www.utexas.edu/know/2009/11/09/cancer_research/#commentsMon, 09 Nov 2009 20:41:46 +0000Marjorie Smithhttp://www.utexas.edu/know/?p=2482The Department of Biomedical Engineering is among a consortium of leading research entities selected to receive up to $11.6 million from the National Cancer Institute to establish a center to conduct innovative cancer research. The new center will be called the Center for Transport Oncophysics. The goal of the five-year initiative is to engage trans-disciplinary scientific teams from fields of engineering, physics, mathematics and chemistry to examine new, non-traditional approaches to cancer research. The Center will receive $2.4 million during the first year and could receive funds totaling $11.6 million over a five-year period.
]]>http://www.utexas.edu/know/2009/11/09/cancer_research/feed/0Audio slideshow: Professor studies cancer/obesity connectionhttp://www.utexas.edu/know/2009/10/13/stephen_hursting/
http://www.utexas.edu/know/2009/10/13/stephen_hursting/#commentsTue, 13 Oct 2009 16:27:25 +0000Marsha Millerhttp://www.utexas.edu/know/?p=2119Professor of Nutrition Dr. Stephen Hursting discusses the link between obesity and cancer and the relationship to children’s health.
]]>http://www.utexas.edu/know/2009/10/13/stephen_hursting/feed/0Dudley elected fellow of American Academy of Microbiologyhttp://www.utexas.edu/know/2009/02/11/dudley-elected-fellow-of-american-academy-of-microbiology/
http://www.utexas.edu/know/2009/02/11/dudley-elected-fellow-of-american-academy-of-microbiology/#commentsWed, 11 Feb 2009 22:32:52 +0000Robin Gerrowhttp://www.utexas.edu/know/?p=711Dr. Jaquelin Dudley, professor of molecular genetics and microbiology, has been elected a fellow in the American Academy of Microbiology. Dudley studies how retroviruses cause mammary tumors in mice, which is a model for breast cancer in humans. She’s been developing a vector system for gene therapy of breast cancer, and in the process, her lab discovered a new viral protein that might help them study HIV.
]]>http://www.utexas.edu/know/2009/02/11/dudley-elected-fellow-of-american-academy-of-microbiology/feed/0